“Why is that bloke on the telly? He does Gordon’s photocopying”. The cry went up among Gordon Brown’s inner circle in the early hours of May 2, 1997, as Labour won its landslide. The 24-year-old on the TV was Chris Leslie, because he had won the safe Conservative seat of Shipley, West Yorkshire.

The London Marathon is an indelible feature of life in the capital, a symbol of the city as potent as Big Ben or Buckingham Palace. But with Prudential RideLondon-Surrey 100 on 2 August, the marathon’s two-wheeled counterpart is well on the way to acquiring comparable status.